Yay robots!

For those of us who don’t read Chip’s blog, I’ve moved in with him into a house in Champaign. We’ve dubbed it AwesomeBase Alpha (his family’s place out in Gifford is known as AwesomeBase Beta, apparently). We’ve gotten roughly $2,000-$3,000 in more-or-less free stuff to furnish the place with, and it’s just about as big as my old place… only to be shared by two relatively quiet guys, instead of 5 guys and their parties.

What’s also nice is that I can take the MTD’s Blue line right from half a block down onto campus and back again, as well as downtown being walking distance from the house.

I’ve been trying (and succeeding!) to read more these past few months. Last night while I was home from work, I was reading some more Terry Prachett. I’d like to say he does to the fantasy genre what Douglas Adams does for science fiction, but in my opinion, Prachett does it better. Perhaps I need to refresh my memory of HHGttG, but Adams just can’t keep me laughing for pages and pages like Prachett can.

Categories: Life of Peawee
No Comments »

Roger Allam is the all-American British badass. If you’re looking for an imposing, “love to hate” bastard for any given production, look no farther.

In the original production of Les Miserables, he played Inspector Javert. In a 2000 London musical Speer he played Hitler.

However, most of us ‘Merkins most likely know him for roles in two pop-culture movies: E. P. Arnold Royalton in Speed Racer, and Lewis Prothero in V for Vendetta.

What we really need is a movie, starring Samuel L. Jackson versus Roger Allam.

Categories: Life of Peawee
No Comments »

…when I want tea, I want tea, damnit. I don’t need some herbal remedy for ailments including but not limited to: PMS, Prostate Health, Joint Health, Sexual Health (!), Random Pain, Dumbness, Smartness, Sleepyness, Awakenness, or anything else.

I just want some black tea that has something along the lines of a citrus fruit in it. Bigelow’s “Lemon Lift”, or almost any Earl Grey blend will do. It shouldn’t take me 10 minutes looking like a fool in the tea isle to find something I want out of all the over-the-counter medicines masquerading as tea.

Thank you.

Categories: Life of Peawee
3 Comments »

Last week, my poor Tempo decided that it no longer wished to be for this world. As this leaves me carless, I went and got myself a new car.

What type of car, you ask?

A 2001 Audi A6 Quattro. And I love it.

It’s smooth, comfortable, and a great highway cruiser. That last part tends to be useful for me, as if I’m not driving 2 miles, I’m driving 200, and I enjoy how comfortable this thing makes long car trips.

Also, it’s badass.

Categories: Life of Peawee
No Comments »

Wow, my last entry was in October. Poor November, no love at all, no love at all!

I’ve gotten myself a shiny new job with the University, doing research programming work for the big $500 million BP Biofuels research project. Hopefully I can see somewhere around half of that in my paycheck. Yeah, right, I know. Eitherway, I still get to do something Big and Fun. With this job will also come a real paycheck that I can actually sock away decent amounts of cash from.

Next semester, I’ve only one class left, and then I’m home free as far as college is concerned. It’s really odd, sitting here at the end of 17 years of schooling, to not be worried about class or homework. I know the Real World is going to bring new challenges, but they’re going to be different challenges. No busywork, no grades, no class requirements, just being given a task and getting it done. It’s a heady feeling to see this almost done, and almost as scary as it’s exciting.

Categories: Life of Peawee
1 Comment »

Two particularly good quotes on the nature of faith, from the early to mid ’90’s sci-fi show Babylon 5:

Faith sustains us in the hour reason tells us we cannot continue, that our lives are without meaning

That’s all that faith requires; that we surrender ourselves to the possibility of hope

Have a wonderfully chilly day!

Categories: Life of Peawee, Quotables
No Comments »

So, Krystal and I are going to go for Halloween as Bond & Bond Girl. As such, I’ve decided I need to trim up a bit for the part, so today I started going to the gym to do that.

I discovered that my legs still are in incredible shape, and after 40 minutes on a leg-centric cardio machine, they still felt fresh as ever.

The rest of me, however, is a different story.

After climbing off the machine, I took a couple of cool-down walking laps around the track. I was able to keep up a nice walking pace. I simply wasn’t able to go any faster however, even if I wanted to. I just didn’t have any more left in me; if I had to do anything which required my body sending extra energy to my legs, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

I do feel much better this afternoon though. I took a nap and methinks I’m going to sleep well through the night.

Now the bigger issue: for doing Bond, I’ve decided I’m going to darken my hair and shave the goatee. I don’t care about the hair, but I’ve had my goatee since my junior year of high school, so that’s going to simply be wierd to look in a mirror and not see goatee.

Categories: Life of Peawee
1 Comment »

The last three 20 oz bottles of LiveWire I’ve obtained have had the “Free 20oz bottle with purchase of Pepsi or Dew” caps, thus granting me three free bottles now. This rocks!

Categories: Life of Peawee
No Comments »

So, continuing the saga of the new storage cluster node, my boss figured out the problem with the MegaCli program. Both the syntax in the manual was wrong, and certain characters in the proper syntax needed to be quoted, otherwise the shell would try and do something with them.

Now, the next problem is our chassis, the SuperMicro SC836E1-R800V. It has what is known as a drive backplane; instead of each of the 16 drives attaching directly to a controller card, which is incredibly messy, the drives plug right into this backplane, and then the backplane attaches to the controller card with a single cable. Nifty, yes?

This chassis has a SAS backplane. SAS is the new storage technology for the new millenium. It works a lot like a normal network, and the industry specifications say it is to be backwards compatible with SATA, the current consumer-level drive interface, so that you can pack something full of cheap, huge drives (and huge SAS drives just don’t exist yet).

The controller chip on the backplane is an LSI SASx28, which proclaims its SATA compatibility long and loud. The controller card on the computer itself is an LSI 8888ELP, which says it’s a SAS/SATA controller. However, apparently, SuperMicro never took the time to ensure that their backplane itself is SATA compatible for one reason or another. And they only informed this of this fact after buying the $1,000 chassis, a $1,000 SAS controller, and $5,000 worth of SATA drives. We’ve been sending them nastygrams, and it looks like they might actually do something about it now, while really we wanted this storage in production by yesterday.

Grr.

Categories: Geeky Peawee, Life of Peawee
2 Comments »

So at work we’re testing out building a new departmental storage cluster. Our needs, especially with regards to Manabe, our cluster, are still network I/O and CPU-bound, so it doesn’t need to be particularly fast, but we would like a single storage namespace, and we want it big. So, withe the combined research that my boss and I have done, we have decided the least unsucky option is to go with a OpenSolaris-based frontend (to use ZFS exported via NFS) with an iSCSI-over-gigabit ethernet SAN. This lets us transition the department over to the storage cluster with a minimum of fuss and grumble, and not worry about iSCSI connection drops due to the campus network repeatedly dropping out, which it does all too often.

So, to implement this SAN, we have currently 4 working chassis of 15 SATA drives each hooked up to 3Ware 9550 controllers. Our newest member, the 5th one, and the one we’re going to actually start the SAN with, is a new notion for us. It’s a 16 SAS drive server, with an LSI 8888 controller. So far, things haven’t been going so well; we started with an Adaptec card, but it was broken, so we got rid of it and are trying the LSI card, seeing the backplane chipset in the server is LSI as well.

However, this backplane apparently doesn’t officially “support” SATA, even though SAS allows for backwards compatibility. Trouble in paradise there. In addition, this LSI card has a command line interface management software called (imaginatively enough) “MegaCli”. This software… has problems. The interface is seriously brain damaged as the command line options suck hardcore… when they work as documented. Which I’m finding out doesn’t happen all the time. I’m looking at you, -PDInfo -PhysDrv. I spent nearly five hours today pulling my already thinning hair out trying to figure this out. It needs to get done sometime soon so we can get this array online, but how can I when it doesn’t work as advertised?

Categories: Geeky Peawee, Life of Peawee
1 Comment »